This AI Literacy Review covers Stanford’s Global AI Vibrancy Tool, the future of academics in the AI age, people’s emotions and AI literacy, health workers’ need for AI literacy, librarians’ frameworks for AI literacy and information literacy, OpenAI’s free course for K-12 educators, books and resources for AI in higher education, critical race algorithmic literacies, the U.S. Department of Education’s guide on discriminatory use of AI, the OECD’s conference on AI, and more funding initiatives for AI training in the US, UK, and Poland.
General
Stanford’s Global AI Vibrancy Tool brings together 42 indicators to show which countries are leading in AI (currently US and China) as an interactive visualization.
Microsoft is hoping to train one million Polish people in AI by the end of 2025 through training courses on its AI Skills Navigator learning hub which are designed for both beginners and advanced users.
The OECD’s International Conference on AI in Work, Innovation, Productivity, and Skills will take place on December 12-13, 2024 both in-person and via live-stream. Sessions will cover topics such as AI’s impact on productivity, gender differences in AI experiences at work, and high-stakes student testing in the age of AI.
Dr. Sabba Quidwai offers a LinkedIn Learning course Beyond the Basics: Designing AI Enhanced Learning Experiences that covers how to use AI to make learning more personalized and effective.
The journal article The future of work of academics in the age of Artificial Intelligence: State-of-the-art and a research roadmap by Maarten Renkema and Aizhan Tursunbayeva examines how academics’ work will be affected by AI and the implications for the creation of knowledge in this group of knowledge workers.
The journal article AI Narratives: What Can They Tell Us About Individuals’ AI Literacy and Emotional Attitudes toward AI Assistants? by Teresa Hammerschmidt et al. finds that people’s emotional attitudes toward AI affects their AI literacy and how critical they are toward this tech and its capabilities, pointing to the need for more understanding so people can develop more nuance in their perceptions of and interactions with AI.
Laurie Bridges reminds us of the plethora of definitions of AI literacy that have appeared in recent years. She prefers this one from an often-cited conference paper on AI Literacy by Pinski and Benlian: “General AI literacy is humans’ socio-technical competence consisting of knowledge regarding human and AI actors in human-AI interaction, knowledge of the AI process steps, that is input, processing, and output, and experience in AI interaction.”
In Over 75% of firms look for AI literacy in prospective employees, Martin Carvalho writes about graduates’ need to be AI literate to be competitive in the job market and people’s views of the topic of AI in Malaysia. The article cites a report showing that 79% of Malaysian professionals expect their roles to change because of AI integration, and 28% expect more significant transformations.
Anna Mills highlights Ted Stresen-Reuter’s chatbot as a way to create fun critical AI literacy activities that can show people how chatbots hallucinate while sounding confident. (see Anna Mills’ LinkedIn post)
In Cognitive bleed: Towards a multidisciplinary mapping of AI literacy fluency, Nigel P. Daly explores the concept of AI fluency and cognitive bleed, defined as the exchange of thought and creativity between humans and AI.
Healthcare
The journal article Contextualizing algorithmic literacy framework for global health workforce education by Seble Frehywot and Yianna Vovides examines how the health workforce is going to become AI literate. It proposes an algorithmic literacy framework to be used in global health workforce education at individual and organizational levels.
The clinical trial in the JAMA article Large Language Model Influence on Diagnostic Reasoning by Ethan Goh et al. looked at whether 50 physicians benefited from using an LLM for diagnostic reasoning compared with conventional resources. Physicians did not improve their clinical reasoning by having access to an LLM, and the LLM alone scored higher than physicians, leading the authors to conclude there is a need for tech and workforce development if there is to be physician-AI collaboration in healthcare practice. But as a New York Times article pointed out, part of the issue was that physicians were treating the LLM like a search engine, rather than putting the case history into it and leveraging its capabilities. Ethan Mollick wrote about the trial in Getting started with AI: Good enough prompting and advised that people need to get around 10 hours of use to overcome some of the barriers to working with AI chatbots. Tim Dasey on LinkedIn noted that the trial didn’t have a very robust experiment design so it’s hard to know whether the physicians would have done better with training.
Libraries
In Is AI literacy an information skill? Emily Dott and Terry Charlton from Newcastle University discuss how librarians worked with academic staff to embed information literacy alongside AI literacy into the curriculum. They believe that AI literacy is a shared responsibility among librarians and other services such as IT, digital education, carers, and academic development.
In McMaster libraries and MacPherson Institute launch generative AI literacy resource for students Jaime Rivard writes about the one-hour resource that teaches students what Gen. AI is, what AI tools can do, and how to use the tools. The project was developed in collaboration with the McMaster University Libraries and the Paul R. MacPherson Institute for Leadership, Innovation and Excellence in Teaching.
Zakir Hossain publishes an AI Citizenship Framework to help guide school librarians in fostering awareness, familiarity, literacy, and citizenship with AI. (see Zakir Hossain’s LinkedIn post)
The authors of the LibTech Insights white paper “Building an AI Literacy Framework” ”, Sandy Hervieux and Amanda Wheatley will be presenting their framework and examples of how to apply it in a Zoom webinar on December 10, 2024.
The International Association of University Libraries’s (IATUL) podcast, Beyond the Shelves, on Spotify has episodes on information literacy and critical AI literacy.
Education
OpenAI releases a free 1-hour online course ChatGPT Foundations for K–12 Educators via Common Sense Education, but it faces criticism from teachers for a lack of consideration of ethics and some contradictory information. Ben Williamson and Eryk Salvaggio and others on LinkedIn were skeptical about this move by the company to push this technology into the classroom. (see Ben Williamson’s LinkedIn post and Eryk Salvaggio’s article How Does OpenAI Imagine K-12 Education?)
Cecilia K. Y. Chan releases an open-access book with Routledge titled Generative AI in Higher Education: The ChatGPT Effect which includes an intro to AI, an AI literacy framework, ChatGPT in curriculum design, assessment, policy development, and more.
Stanford Teaching Commons creates an AI literacy framework inspired by Kimberly Pace Becker et al., Stuart A. Selber, and UNESCO that includes four interconnected circles for functional, ethical, rhetorical, and pedagogical AI literacy domains.
In Tiera Tanksley’s article “We’re changing the system with this one”: Black students using critical race algorithmic literacies to subvert and survive AI-mediated racism in school she introduces a new type of digital literacy called critical race algorithmic literacy and explains how Black high school students developed both technical skills and a deep knowledge base about AI. They moved from being terrified to being informed and able to critique the technologies and their larger impact on people and the environment. (see Tiera Tanksley’s LinkedIn post)
MJ Morris creates an Educator AI Literacy graphic to give an idea of the varied kinds of areas educators need practice in to be able to help students develop AI literacy. The graphic covers 8 areas from foundational knowledge and prompt engineering to generative imaging and video. (see MJ Morris’ LinkedIn post)
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights publishes a guide on Avoiding the Discriminatory Use of Artificial Intelligence, covering different types of discrimination, real-world examples of discrimination scenarios, AI use in assessment, and factors to look at in AI tools.
Jeanne Beatrix Law in Bits on Bots – Continuing the Conversation on Generative AI: Prompting and Ethics Frameworks shares how the AI literacy initiatives are going at Kennesaw State University and the success of their Rhetorical Prompt Engineering framework.
The article AI literacy course prepares ASU students to set cultural norms for new technology describes a new course at Arizona State University called AI Literacy in Design and the Arts that covers the pros and cons and ethical issues relating to AI. The course hopes to be a template for AI literacy courses in other disciplines aside from the School of Music, Dance and Theatre.
North Carolina A&T State University partners with Google to teach AI literacy to college students and eventually younger students as part of a $25 million initiative with 10 states in the U.S. that focuses on students in K-12 education. The curriculum will have three focus areas (agriculture, equity, and AI foundations) to close gaps in existing resources and better target rural areas.
EDC has been given $2 million as part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) initiative to increase AI literacy among youth and adults and prepare them for the workforce. The title of the project is Integrating Artificial Intelligence Literacy into Community College Programs.
Nabil Zary’s AI Literacy Framework (ALiF): A Progressive Competency Development Protocol for Higher Education offers a structured approach to developing AI literacy in higher education via a three-level progression system across four core competency areas: Technical Understanding, Critical Evaluation, Practical Application, and Ethical Considerations.
Google is providing over £865,000 to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to work with ParentZone in the UK to scale the Experience AI program and teacher training in AI literacy, with the goal of reaching 250,000 students by 2026. It’s also launched an AI campus in London to develop local AI talent.
The author of Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Joseph Aoun, is now Northeastern University President, and he believes that being ‘robot-proof’ means giving students a combo of AI literacy, data literacy, and human literacy.
School staff in North Carolina encountered hesitation and concerns when they proposed new Generative AI guidelines to the school board at a curriculum and policy committee meeting, with the chair pushing for all AI websites to be blocked on school Chromebooks and others noting that education has to adapt to reality and take the opportunity to teach students about responsible usage.
The California IT in Education Conference featured a session on how to incorporate AI tools into education and the role that computer science can play in general education.
Graham Clay in AI Literacy and “Technical” Knowledge explores the paradox of AI prompting, how much technical knowledge is actually needed to use AI for complex tasks and coding, and how this might affect our approach to education.
The journal article Cognitive ease at a cost: LLMs reduce mental effort but compromise depth in student scientific inquiry by Matthias Stadler et al. finds that chatbots reduce cognitive load in students but may limit students’ reasoning and argumentation abilities.
